Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. These semiconductor devices are fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography and etching processes to form circuit components and elements on the semiconductor substrate.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also use a smaller package that utilizes a smaller area or a lower height, in some applications.
New packaging technologies have been developed to improve the density and functionality of semiconductor dies further. For example, three-dimensional integrated circuit (3DIC) packages have been developed. These relatively new types of packaging technologies for semiconductor dies face manufacturing challenges, and they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects.